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On the performance of wavelength meters: Part 1—consequences for medium-to-high-resolution laser spectroscopy

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Abstract

Present-day laser-spectroscopy experiments increasingly rely on modern commercial devices to monitor, stabilize, and scan the wavelength of their probe laser. Recently, new techniques are capable of achieving unprecedented levels of precision on atomic and nuclear observables, pushing these devices to their performance limits. Considering the fact that these observables themselves are deduced from the frequency difference between specific atomic resonances, in the order of MHz–GHz, the uncertainty on the output of the device measuring the wavelength is often directly related to the final systematic uncertainty on the experimental results. Owing to its importance, the performance of several commercial wavelength meters was compared against different reference sources, including a Scanning Fabry–Pérot Interferometer (SFPI) and a frequency comb. Reproducible, wavelength- and device-dependent disagreements are observed, potentially skewing the experimental output at high precision. In this paper, a practical and relatively inexpensive wavelength meter characterization procedure is presented and validated. This method is capable of improving the precision on wavelength differences considerably depending on the device, while together with a second investigation that is published separately, (König et al., in Appl Phys B, 2020), it offers a full description of the expected wavelength meter performance for users.

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Acknowledgements

This work has received funding from Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, Belgium), from the Excellence of Science program (EOS, FWO-FNRS, Belgium), by GOA/2015/010 and STG/15/031 (BOF KU Leuven), by the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Program initiated by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BriX network P7/12), from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grants Agreement no. 654002 (ENSAR2), from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (ERC-2011-AdG-291561-HELIOS), from the German Federal Ministry of Educations and Research (BMBF) under contracts 05P19RDFN1 and 05P18RFCIA, and from the German Research Foundation (DFG) under contract DU 1134/1-2. M.V. is supported by an FWO grant (Aspirant-1121820N). A significant share of the research work described herein originates from R&D carried out in the frame of the FAIR Phase-0 program of LASPEC/NUSTAR. The authors would like to thank both F. Karlewski (HighFinesse) for his efforts and the fruitful discussions and P. Imgram (TU Darmstadt) for his support with the transfer cavity setup at JYFL.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KU Leuven, Instituut voor Kern-en Stralingsfysica, Celestijnenlaan 200D, 3001, Leuven, Belgium

    M. Verlinde, K. Dockx, T. E. Cocolios, R. Ferrer, Yu. Kudryavtsev, P. Van den Bergh & P. Van Duppen

  2. Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä, 40014, Jyväskylä, Finland

    S. Geldhof, R. P. de Groote & I. Moore

  3. Institut für Kernphysik, TU Darmstadt, 64289, Darmstadt, Germany

    K. König & W. Nörtershäuser

  4. Institut für Physik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, 55099, Mainz, Germany

    D. Studer, T. Kieck & K. Wendt

  5. Helmholtz-Institut Mainz, 55128, Mainz, Germany

    S. Raeder

  6. GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH, 64291, Darmstadt, Germany

    S. Raeder

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  1. M. Verlinde
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Verlinde, M., Dockx, K., Geldhof, S. et al. On the performance of wavelength meters: Part 1—consequences for medium-to-high-resolution laser spectroscopy. Appl. Phys. B 126, 85 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00340-020-07425-4

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